Rogue One: A Star Wars Story actor Riz Ahmed shares he was stopped by TSA agents on his way to Star Wars Celebration in Chicago this past April, blaming it on “racial profiling.” The London-born Emmy winner said he has been stopped and searched at several airports in the past.
“It’s really scary to be a Muslim right now, super scary,” Ahmed said at the Creative Arts Agency Amplify conference last week in his first comments about missing the Chicago convention, reports Metro. “I’ve often wondered, is this going to be the year when they round us up, if this is going to be the year they put Trump’s registry into action. If this is going to be the year they ship us all off.”
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Ahmed was scheduled to sign autographs and meet fans at the convention, but pulled out at the last moment. Organizers said Ahmed canceled his appearance “due to circumstances beyond his control.”
The 36-year-old actor, whose parents were born in Pakistan, went on to discuss the limited roles for Muslim actors in Hollywood.
“I think lives are quite literally at stake here,” he said, urging Hollywood to change how Muslims are portrayed on the screen. “The representation of Muslims on screen – that feeds the policies that get enacted, the people that get killed, the countries that get invaded.”
During the conference, Ahmed noted how Muslim stars like himself, Hasan Minaj and Olympian Ibtihaj Muhammad can have success, but there are still “systemic” obstacles Muslim actors face.
“How I do what I do is because like all of you here, I’m a code-switcher. We all know how to change the way we talk, the way we dress, the way we walk as we enter one room or another,” Ahmed told the audience, reports The International News. “We all know how to navigate terrain that isn’t of our own making. That’s how I can do it, but that’s not why I do what I do. The why is because I don’t want to have to code-switch anymore.”
Ahmed earned his breakthrough acting role opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in the acclaimed 2014 thriller Nightcrawler. It led to him being cast in Rogue One as pilot Bodhi Rook and as Nasir Khan in HBO’s miniserises The Night Of. The HBO series earned Ahmed an Emmy win for Oustanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie, becoming the first Muslim to win a leading Emmy award.
The Venom actor, who also performs as Riz MC, has been vocal about pushing for better roles and representation for Muslim actors in Hollywood. In a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Ahmed said he would “rather be broke” than have to play a stereotypical terrorist character.
“I was lucky that I came into the game just when we were moving from that stage one caricature into stage two,” Ahmed said at the time. “So a lot of my early work deals with the issues around the war on terror or Islamophobia, but I’m proud to say it deals with and engages those issues in creative ways and I hope in ways that move us forward rather than doubling down on lazy stereotypes. But yeah, there was a lot of, like, Terrorist No. 3 stuff — I just made a decision I wasn’t going to do it. I thought, ‘I’d rather be broke.’”
Ahmed was recently seen in an episode of Netflix’s The OA and is now working on Mughal Mowgli, a film about a rapper whose first tour is derailed by an illness.
Photo credit: Matt Crossick/PA Images via Getty Images
